Google puts users in control with search revamp

Google introduced three new enhancements to its search engine on Tuesday, giving searchers new ways to filter results and adding new types of data to the search results.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and experience, led a parade of the company's product managers on stage at Searchology 2009 to demonstrate the new features, known as Google Search Options, Google Squared, and Rich Snippets.

Search Options will give searchers ways to filter their results based on factors like timeliness, result type such as image or videos, or a desire to see search results in visual form.

The announcements "centre around how can you find more and what can you do with it", Mayer said. Google last held a Searchology event in 2007, when it introduced Universal Search, blending regular search results with images, video and news results.

Building on Universal Search, Mayer and Nundu Janakiram, an associate product manager, showed how Search Options allows users searching for information on the Hubble Telescope, for example, to filter their results with a "Show Options" link at the very top of the search results page. Clicking on that link brings up a new page with a list of options on the side - similar to the current Google News user interface.

Other options include new ways to visualise search results, such as the News Timeline introduced last month, as well as Wonder Wheel, which visually represents data as rays of a star spreading out from the centre of a search result.

Google Squared is the newest addition to Google Labs. This project allows searchers to create a spreadsheet based on web results. Users can filter the data accessed through the Google Squared search, request additional categories to create a custom spreadsheet with the results that matter the most to them, and even fact-check the results by accessing the source of the data as well as alternative sources.

Rich Snippets is a partnership between Google and certain publishers to display information from web pages within the box that encompasses a search result. Google is backing open standards called RDFa markup and Microformats markup that allow web publishers to highlight aspects of their web page to show in the search results.

The feature is closely related to Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey, which the Google rival released a year ago. SearchMonkey allows outside developers to create their own SearchMonkey extensions to spotlight content, but to try to encourage use by more publishers, Yahoo! has been working to make SearchMonkey easier to use.

Original article: Google adds new filters, visualized results from CNET News.com